Many large companies face high product development expenditures due to inefficient awareness of existing expertise and sharing of that expertise and knowledge within the company. For example, a company may have several thousand employees spread over numerous of countries conducting research and development projects in different offices. Results developed during one research and development project in a company's office in Munich, for example, may be invaluable to another research and development project that is taking place in a company's office in New York. However, inefficient information management may cause the office in New York to unnecessarily spend thousands of dollars pursuing the same result already being sought by the team of co-workers in Munich.
The process of “capturing” knowledge in large organizations usually centers on a publishing model in which the burden falls on individual people to create documents about what they know. The process of creating documents is not only time consuming, but produces an unsatisfactory result, for several fundamental reasons. First, it is virtually impossible to capture the complete context and details of any project or business issue into a document. Information that is omitted may not have seemed important to the author, but it could be extremely valuable to someone else within the company. Second, there is a delay between the time at which business activities occur and the time at which a person can summarize those activities into a document, causing delays in availability of the latest development breakthroughs and/or the most current project statuses. In addition, not all of the information necessarily can be shared publicly. Due to the sensitive nature of some information, the originator of that information may wish to share it only with a certain set of people and/or under specific circumstances. This type of information rarely gets published, and an opportunity to gain further value from the information is often completely lost.